Anarchists, question for you...

[otherone]

Bingo; without a state no one has any rights to any property.

You have it backwards.
The only Rights one has is those he can defend. One relinquishes his Rights when he cedes the defense of those Rights to the state.

 

[TaftFan]

You know, I have realized that I cannot be morally in disagreement with anarchism.

I thought my opposition or skepticism came from the idea that anarchism would not work, or organize itself.

I now realize I was wrong. Society will organize, but everybody has different visions of how it should be organized. And it will likely be organized into a state once again.

So I don't want to be an anarchist. I want to formulate a government that best serves my interest, the interests of peace, liberty, and property rights. We should work towards that end of creating the greatest bulwark against tyranny.

Yes, there will be a state. The world will also always be sinful. The key is to attain the best possible situation. The NAP is a moral principle, but not attainable by society, and is also not the exclusive moral principle. Utilitarian libertarianism is higher on my morality scale. And our scales are all arbitrary, so I can't say my order is certainly wrong or right.

We all just exercise our "market preference" I suppose.

 

[TaftFan]

Also, I do think anarchism is the perfect goalpost.

But make the incrementalism count. If we actually get there, which I doubt, that is the bonus we all deserve.

 

[TaftFan]

I do have a question for any anarchist who would like to answer:

Do you consider a state that does not rely on taxation, but does exert force, to be similar/related if not the same thing to a private libertarian security agency? (Perhaps a security agency merged with a fire department, etc. Mergers do happen in a free market)

 

[erowe1]

Also, I do think anarchism is the perfect goalpost.

But make the incrementalism count. If we actually get there, which I doubt, that is the bonus we all deserve.

If you think anarchy is the perfect goalpost, doesn't that make you an anarchist?

 

[TaftFan]

If you think anarchy is the perfect goalpost, doesn't that make you an anarchist?

I would like a world without government, though I don't see it happening. But I do agree with the morality arguments for it.

 

[erowe1]

I do have a question for any anarchist who would like to answer:

Do you consider a state that does not rely on taxation, but does exert force, to be similar/related if not the same thing to a private libertarian security agency? (Perhaps a security agency merged with a fire department, etc. Mergers do happen in a free market)

That depends on what kind of exertion of force.

There are legitimate ways that you and I could use force. And we could legitimately delegate these uses of force to others.

The point at which you can identify a state is at that point where some group of people is using force in a way that would not be legitimate for the rest of us with the expectation that we should all think it's legitimate when they do it. Taxation, eminent domain, immigration control, and conscription, are all examples of uses of force that would entail a state. The defense of oneself and others and the pursuit of justice for a crime committed against someone are not.

 

[erowe1]

I would like a world without government, though I don't see it happening. But I do agree with the morality arguments for it.

That's exactly where I am.

I am morally opposed to the state. I don't have to hold out any expectation of there ever being statelessness for me to have that moral opposition.

In fact, the way I see it, there is no size to which a state could shrink at which point it would be essentially morally different than a state. If there are two people in an alley and one is mugging the other, I see no way to say that's not a state. We won't eliminate all such things. But wherever they happen, they're wrong.

 

[ChristianAnarchist]

Ok, well of those 15%, some will be killed, some will be taken prisoner, some will eventually run out of ammo, etc. The war will water that 15% down. Then what?

Well YOU assumed the "resistance" I was talking about was a violent uprising. I never said anything about that. I was talking about the POWER of the truth. The truth being that they have NO LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY. When the breaking point of people (which I estimate to be 15%) actually get this through their heads, the tide turns and people resist the tyranny. This "resistance" would take numerous forms. I'm sure their would be some violence but the greater part of "resistance" would be in simply ignoring their stupid "laws". With those kind of numbers ignoring the laws, there is no power on earth that would be able to place them all in "custody" or a "pretend trial"...

 

[Neil Desmond]

This fails to explain what crtiteria was used to arrive at a decision. As far as I can tell it was just random, a flip of a coin. That's just an inherently amoral system. It also imposes laws on people that are established after an incident & I think that's immoral. With the state, you get to know who's right and who's wrong ahead of time, because the law exists before the incident. In the US, if there is no law against something, then you committed no crime. That's way better than the fiasco of a perpetual state of dilemma that an anarchist society would impose on it's unsuspecting victims. The state looks like a better system to me than anarchism, because with it there are deeds and public records that anyone can examine to determine who owns what plots of land. For a state, a judge doesn't flip a coin to determine who owns what plot of land, he or she refers to the same deeds and public records that anyone can examine and use that to make a decision. They're not really making a decision at all, they're just repeating what the public records and deeds say.

 

[Neil Desmond]

Every individual does not honor it with a state either, that's why you have criminals. Rules = law, watch that video I already posted 2 times to find out how they are established.

We have criminals predominantly because of scarcity, and the state has solutions for how to deal with individuals who don't honor the rights of others.

If someone has a different version of the rules, that's exactly what dispute resolution is for. It's called polycentric law.

That's just another problem with anarchism, there can be conflicting versions of rules; with the state, there is no such conundrum.

David Friedman, Milton Friedman's son has don a TON of work on polycentric legal orders. Just look some of his stuff up on youtube.



Not even close.

I'll check it out this weekend.

 

[Neil Desmond]

LOL. We owe them our lives, don't we. What have we been thinking? Free people and all that nonsense. We never would have even developed written language without the state.

I thought you were just some naive kid trying to outsmart the dumb radicals, but now I'm convinced you are here working for someone. Who is it?

The collective and the individual.

 

[Neil Desmond]

You must have ignored every single argument which has been made thus far, contra to your OP, to make such a statement.

This assetion is an absurdity.

Or, I thought they were invalid or unsound arguments.

 

[Neil Desmond]

You want a utilitarian argument on behalf of statelessness? The state is made up of individuals.

Next.

What I'm trying to find out is if there's a way that anarchism can sustain or perpetuate itself, as long as there's scarcity in society. I would like to be able to advocate anarchism if I can defend it; I can't right now, which is why I'm posing the same questions & making the same statements that I would expect to hear if I were to try to advocate it. These are very tough questions, and I hope to find a solution; many people have stated that they believe that there is no solution, which is what I also believe, but I want to be sure to explore any possibility so I can say with confidence that nope, there is no solution, or I find something. Right now I have suggestions for material to look at, so I will be doing that when I have the opportunity; and I do appreciate the suggestions.

 

[Neil Desmond]

That's not true. If murder is wrong, it's because the Creator says it's wrong. If the Creator says it's wrong, then no state has any right to say it isn't, nor would it cease to be wrong absent any state. If the Creator doesn't say it's wrong, then no state could make it wrong. The most any state could do then is declare it illegal according to some law that someone made up with no authority.

On the other hand, if murder is wrong, and if theft and kidnapping are also wrong, and if there do not exist any special people in the world where, for all the rest of us those things are wrong but for those special people they aren't, then the state itself is inherently wrong, since the state, by definition, is some group of people that arrogate to themselves the right to do those things to everyone else.

Seems like a good argument for advocating a theocracy to religious people - but I'm specifically referring to anarchism, not a theocracy & not just religious people.

 

[mczerone]

This fails to explain what crtiteria was used to arrive at a decision. As far as I can tell it was just random, a flip of a coin. That's just an inherently amoral system. It also imposes laws on people that are established after an incident & I think that's immoral.

It's a system that's as moral as the people within it - no more, no less. Any deviation would cost the decision maker economically.

With the state, you get to know who's right and who's wrong ahead of time, because the law exists before the incident. In the US, if there is no law against something, then you committed no crime.

Bullcrap. There are a number of ways to argue against this claim, highest among them: (1) you can't know all the statutory laws - there are too many; (2) the written law can be interpreted 20 different ways by 10 different judges; (3) there are still many situations where legal experts agree that "the law" is unclear about the outcome of a case - either due to novel facts applied to old statutes or to new statutes being applied to a set of facts that used to be treated differently; (4) Statutes change every day in the regulatory, civil and criminal codes - not to mention the procedural rules of the courts; (5) there are umbrella charges that can be applied to anyone at any time - commonly called "contempt of cop"; and (6) even in statist jurisprudence it is generally accepted that "the law" is not something that anyone can know all of at any time - it is merely "discovered" by trial and error over time.

That's way better than the fiasco of a perpetual state of dilemma that an anarchist society would impose on it's unsuspecting victims.

Unsuspecting victims? You would consent to rules of behavior upon your own actions, and know explicitly what you can and can not do to others and keep your representation by your selected DRO. The statist system better fits your critique here: at any time an agency with which you've never contracted can change their rules and come after you for breaking them.

The state looks like a better system to me than anarchism, because with it there are deeds and public records that anyone can examine to determine who owns what plots of land. For a state, a judge doesn't flip a coin to determine who owns what plot of land, he or she refers to the same deeds and public records that anyone can examine and use that to make a decision. They're not really making a decision at all, they're just repeating what the public records and deeds say.

So because something was written down by one agency at some point makes the decision right? First, why wouldn't there be "publicly inspected records" in a voluntary society? It seems that a cooperative agency would find benefit in providing this service, and could survive economically by charging Title insurers a premium for certified deeds at the time of sale of a property. Second, your prior argument against distributed/voluntary law was that it was "immoral" - this blind following of state records of ownership is demonstrably immoral. There are cases in US courts that take these records back to their first creation, and have held that conquest of the land by the British crown was a superior claim to a voluntary deed transfer from the native owner to a willing buyer.

The whole statist system is nothing but violence all the way down.

 

[Neil Desmond]

Oh I see, so if "the state" declares it's objectively good to kill Jews then killing Jews is right and not wrong. Because you know, a coercive monopoly based on the principle of authority is how we determine what is just. The state is the One True God. No one can determine what is right or wrong without it's monopoly authority on what's right or wrong.

No, that would be immoral & it would be moral to depose the regime in charge of such a government. Morals determine what's right & wrong to the state, not the other way around.

Clearly this means we need a One World Government because we can't have all these differing rules and concepts of justice all over the place. Only the objectivity of the One True World God-vernment can coerce us into global harmony, according to His central plan.

I responded with "no" + I already discussed this one-world government issue in a different post.

Oh and also the state centrally plans the meaning of words... it's not like natural language, which is a decentralized and emergent phenomenon, has anything to do with it.

In the US it doesn't, but it ought to. I'm opposed to having a language of a empires from which we declared independence. I think that we should be establishing and standardizing one with congress, just like the constitution grants congress the power to fix the standard of weights and measures.

 

[mczerone]

We have criminals predominantly because of scarcity, and the state has solutions for how to deal with individuals who don't honor the rights of others.

Scarcity is exacerbated by the state: It enriches the powerful and well-connected off the property and effort of the poor and middle class, leading to more desperate people. It also creates profoundly idiotic prohibitions that drive otherwise legitimate behavior to the black market, where real violent crime is more likely and where the products are more expensive which drives more people to crime to support criminalized behavior.

That's just another problem with anarchism, there can be conflicting versions of rules; with the state, there is no such conundrum.

Again, you have no idea how much conflict there is even within a single state with "uniform" rules. That's partly why courts exist even in the statist system - to resolve conflicts in the interpretation of rules. And between states and nations there is even more conflict - even though people claimed by those entities can trade across the arbitrary boundaries of those entities. There is anarchy among the different nations, and while there are wars and trade barriers and bad things, there is, for the most part, a network of treaties and agreements that aren't governed by any higher body than the signatories themselves that govern the behavior of the entities.

What free-market courts would bring to the table is a market test of the decisions on which version of the rules is the most just. The statist system is so far removed from the market that the whole system might have to crash before something like marijuana prohibition is determined by the system to not be worth it. If a court in a free market tried to outlaw something so innocuous and prevalent, it would be bankrupt before sunset.

Would you rather a system responsible for ensuring justice for 300 million people crash into chaos when bad decisions are made, or would you rather have a single part of a network drop out as a result of it's own bad decision, affecting only those people who voluntarily chose it, and only burdening them with the choice of what node on the network is their next best option? If Nike goes out of business, you can still buy 20 different brands of shoes. If a state service fails, there is no matching infrastructure that already has production structured to provide all it's citizens the service to replace their needs.

 

[Neil Desmond]

Have you checked out what government does? Taxation is involuntary servitude enforced.

No, it's not involuntary servitude at all. Property rights do not exist without the state, and taxes belong to the state if there is a constitutional law stating such a thing.

 

[Neil Desmond]

I made it a policy long ago never to waste my time responding to people who pre-suppose the validity of Statism and then demand that Anarchists justify themselves.

In nine cases out of ten, such challenges are just trollish attempts to stir up arguments. Such challengers have no desire to be persuaded or convinced, and it is almost always a complete waste of time to try.

Hence, I have nothing to say to the OP. I stopped playing "King of the Hill" when I was a little kid.

What about the remaining one case out of the ten? It's not clear to me what your assessment is there.